For a long time, I hated my body. I and so many others are constantly reminded that our bodies are not good enough. Recently, in a Jewish women’s Facebook forum, I came across a post depicting two images of a Disney princess. On the left side, there was the princess in her normal, hyper-thin form. On the right was a much larger, fatter image of the same princess. The left side was captioned “before passover” and the right was labeled “after passover,” with a cautionary word about turning into the larger princess. The post was soon deleted, but the message was clear: thin was good, fat was bad. It was our job as women, as princesses, not to turn into the princess on the right. Our emotional response to the holiday should not be the traditional celebration of freedom but rather one of caution not to ruin our bodies.

For perhaps the first time, I was able to encounter a message like this and realize that the problem was not me and my body; rather, the problem was society’s pernicious attitude towards fatness that permeates just about everything. It took me years to realize that I was not the problem because society writ large is not alone in its incessant, explicit shaming of fat people. People close to me, from my friends to family to therapists, have all suggested that I’d be happier and a better person if I just “lost the weight,” as if it were not part of me, as if my body were not good enough to be mine. After long, difficult, internal work, I have come to unlearn this belief. Along the way, to my pleasant surprise, I have learned that my religious practice can help me along this journey.

All of these fat-shaming messages did violence to my self-esteem, and I do not want to diminish the importance of professionals in my healing process, which is still underway. However, I would like to highlight the ways in which my religious stance helped me along this journey.

At first, I used religion to distance myself from my body. My physical self was bad, but my spiritual/emotional/intellectual self could be good. I pray daily, I am emotionally intelligent, and I am gifted at Torah study. Judaism was a way for me to be good when my body was bad. I threw myself into these cerebral religious pursuits in which I had a refuge from the parts of myself that I hated.

Part of my healing process was overcoming this dichotomy. Through many conversations and helpful articles, I learned to stop filtering my self-understanding through a framework of good vs. bad and understand my body as simply neutral. It wasn’t “bad”; it just was. However, as my healing progressed, I slowly developed a new understanding in which my Jewish practice helped me understand myself as an integrated whole. In the past few years, for a variety of reasons, I have begun to practice a few daily embodied rituals. An interesting side effect of these practices is a new focus on how I can incorporate my body into religious practice. It can wear religious garments and pieces of Torah and can perform acts of kindness. My body is an active participant in my religious life and is capable of so much good. Far from bad or neutral, my body is a strong and important part of my relationship with God.

I am learning to reclaim my whole self as a part of a religious identity, though loving my body is still difficult for me. One day, I will see the beauty in it, too.